How to Talk to a Widower

by Jonathan Tropper

  “Mom,” I say hoarsely, shaking my head.

  She opens her eyes. “It’s okay, Douglas.”

  “It’s not okay.”

  “It’s life, that’s all. There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there’s not a thing you can do about it.”

  “I’m sorry we all turned out like this,” I say. “It must hurt you.”

  She shrugs. “If it were all so easy, no one would ever need me, and then what would I do for attention?”

  “It’s always about you, isn’t it?”

  “Life’s a stage, and I’m the star of the show.”

  “You want me to make you up a bed?”

  “Just bring me a blanket, I’m going to stay right here,” she says, looking back down at Claire with so much tenderness that I have to look away. “And, Douglas?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t forget about my wine.”

  29

  WORD THAT THE TOWN WIDOWER HAS BEGUN TO date spreads like a virus, and soon my machine is filled with messages from friends and neighbors calling to tell me about divorced and widowed women I simply have to meet, single sisters and cousins I would just love. Claire ruthlessly narrows down the field by first deleting any messages that don’t meet her criteria, and then by making terse follow-up phone calls asking for ludicrously elaborate physical descriptions, accompanying photos, and detailed relationship histories.

  “I’m just trying to avoid any hurt feelings down the road. Now you’ve got my e-mail address. We’ll talk after I see the pictures.”

  “You’ve already told me about what a pretty face she has. I’m asking you about her ass. It’s a yes/no question. Listen, put your husband on the phone.”

  “And was that by C-section or vaginal delivery? Okay. Find out and get back to me.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with trusting you. All due respect, Rabbi, but your profession is in no way a guarantee of your aesthetic sensibilities.”

  Ultimately, she settles on Suzanne Jasper, a divorcée in her early thirties who is being championed by Mike. She is his next-door neighbor, and he would have dated her himself if he weren’t madly in love with Debbie. I’m fast learning that attached men want to set me up with the women they secretly lust after, to date vicariously through me. They would if they could, but they can’t so I should. According to Mike, Suzanne’s life fell apart a few years ago when the fourteen-year-old girl her husband had met in a chat room and arranged to meet at a motel in Connecticut turned out to be an FBI agent trolling for sexual predators. Judging from her nervous demeanor over dinner at Mineo’s Italian Bistro, Suzanne is still getting over the shock of it all. Her smile looks strained, like she’s lifting weights under the table, and her laugh, which comes too quickly, is jagged and high-pitched. But she’s got piles of long blond hair, smoky blue eyes, and a sharp, self-deprecating wit. And she likes me instantly because I have all my hair, and no ex-wife or competing kids. I have been touched by an act of God. I am appealingly damaged: young, slim, sad, and beautiful.

  The problem with dates is that you invariably have to talk about what you do, and for me that will mean talking about my column, which will mean talking about Hailey, which is not something I want to do. So instead we talk about our childhoods and siblings—I can usually get some good mileage out of being a twin—and then we talk about movies, which is fine with me because I’ve seen everything, then the colleges we attended, and then, scraping the bottom of the conversation barrel, bad date stories.

  And things are going fine, or as fine as things can go between two shaky, broken people whose previous lives were shattered overnight, and she’s undeniably sexy, in a muted, bug-eyed sort of way, and I’m actually starting to wonder what it would be like to kiss her, and what kind of underwear she wears, when her cell phone rings. “Oh crap,” she says, flipping the phone closed. “Sam’s sick.”

  Suzanne has two young boys, Sam and Mason, and they seemed cute enough when I came to pick her up at her house an hour ago. But when we walk in now, Sam, the five-year-old, is standing on a chair and puking violently into the kitchen sink, and Mason, the three-year-old, is perched on the kitchen table, crying his head off. The babysitter, a chubby high school girl with a mouthful of braces and dime-sized chin zits, looks panicked and practically throws herself at Suzanne’s feet when we walk through the door.

  “Oh my God! How could he throw up so much?” Suzanne says, eyeing a large puddle of puke on the hallway floor.

  “That was me,” the girl says, embarrassed. “The smell of vomit makes me sick.”

  “Perfect,” Suzanne says grimly. She grabs a twenty from her bag. “Go home, Dana.”

  “Are you sure?” Dana says, but she’s already pocketing the money and heading for the door.

  Suzanne runs into the kitchen and puts her hands on Sam’s shoulders. “It’s okay, baby. Mommy’s here.” Sam looks up at her, his face and shirt caked with dried puke, and emits a sad whimper before turning back to the sink to puke. “Oh my God,” Suzanne says, feeling his neck. “He’s burning up.”

  Meanwhile, Mason’s cries are unrelenting, so I take a step toward him, looking to calm him down, but he backs away from me and falls off the table, banging his head on the edge as he goes, and I’d have thought he couldn’t get any louder, but Mason’s got range, and now he digs deep and lets loose with a bloodcurdling scream that makes the small hairs on my neck stand up. He keeps it going for so long, that I worry he’ll stop breathing and pass out, or have some sort of kiddy stroke. Suzanne scoops him up in her arms and says, “Breathe, baby,” while Sam continues to heave over the sink. “It’s okay, Mason, the man was just trying to help you.”

  “Ice!” Mason cries.

  “Could you get him some ice from the freezer?” Suzanne says.

  “Sure,” I say. “Although it really wasn’t much of a bang.”

  “Ice!” Mason screams, glowering at me over his mother’s shoulder.

  “He likes ice,” Suzanne says, combing his hair back with her fingers.

  In the freezer I find a hard blue ice pack, the kind you throw into coolers, and the instant it touches Mason’s forehead, he stops crying like someone flipped a switch. Suzanne hands him to me, and, to my surprise, he comes willingly, nestling against my chest, holding the ice pack to his head with solemn urgency. Then she wets a dishtowel and starts rubbing Sam’s neck and back with one hand, pulling off his vomit-crusted shirt with the other, whispering and cooing to him as she goes. This display of maternal competency, the effortless blending of compassion and efficiency, is something that I of all people should find attractive, having been married to a single mother myself, but it leaves me cold, although the cloying stench of vomit in the air might have something to do with that.

  Sam’s running a fever of a hundred and four, and after paging the pediatrician, Suzanne decides to take him to the emergency room. Having prematurely dismissed her nauseated sitter, she’s now faced with the unenviable choice of bringing Mason along, or asking me to babysit. “I hate to ask you,” she says, slipping a fresh T-shirt over Sam’s head. “But I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “I’m great with kids.”

  “It’s way past his bedtime. I’ll put him to bed upstairs and you can just hang out in the living room and watch TV. You won’t even know he’s there.”

  “It’s fine. I’m happy to help. Just tell me where you keep the mop.”

  “The mop?”

  “I normally don’t mop vomit until the third date, but it just feels like we’re clicking.”

  She smiles. “I’m sorry about our date. I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” she says, and then blanches at what might have been perceived as a sexual innuendo.

  “It’s fine.”

  “You really don’t have to clean up.”
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  “Trust me. I really do.”

  She carries Mason back to his bedroom, leaving me in the hallway with Sam, who looks like the world’s youngest hangover victim, leaning up against the wall for support, dazedly rubbing his eyes. “I know how you feel,” I say sympathetically. Suzanne emerges a few minutes later, hurriedly throwing a coat on Sam as she hustles him to the door. “Make yourself at home,” she says to me. “Help yourself to anything you want.” And then she’s gone.

  It takes longer than you’d think to clean up vomit. The mop just seems to be spreading it around the floor, so I switch to paper towels, eventually going through three rolls. Then, after I’ve mopped again, I gather all the paper towels into a garbage bag and throw it in the garage, along with the mop, which is beyond saving at this point. But even after all of my cleaning and spraying the kitchen floor with Lysol, the smell of vomit seems to be following me, and that’s when I discover the stiffened puke stain in the shape of Italy on my pants, just below the knee. I locate Suzanne’s washer and dryer in an alcove off the kitchen, pull off my pants, and put them in with a little detergent. After setting the machine on permanent press, I walk around the house in my tighty-whities for a while, examining her pictures—all evidence of her ex-husband has been surgically expunged—and then poke around the pantry and the fridge, looking for a snack. In a cabinet above the fridge I discover a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, and I hesitate for a moment, but I’m anticipating a long night and she did say I should help myself to anything I want, so I pull down the bottle, some Ritz crackers, and a Sesame Street juice box as my chaser, and settle down in the living room to watch some television. She’s only got basic cable, which she was wise not to disclose earlier because it may very well have been a deal-breaker. Every channel seems to be showing a medical drama or a police procedural where the well-dressed cops spend half the show in a dim hi-tech lab that looks more like a nightclub, trying to mine drama out of running tests on a piece of clothing fiber, and Suzanne’s DVD collection seems to be limited to animated Disney movies. I channel surf fruitlessly for a half hour or so, and before you know it, I’m a third of the way into the Johnnie Walker. When I stand up, the skin of my thighs separates audibly from the leather couch like peeling fruit leather.

  Feeling a little woozy, I go to check on my pants. The wash cycle is over, so I throw them into the dryer and then look for the bathroom. There’s a sheet of plastic taped over the doorway to the powder room, and through it I can see the stripped walls and exposed studs and wires of a renovation job in progress, so I head upstairs, my socks sinking into the plush carpeting, stirring up static electricity that zaps me through my fingers when I inadvertently touch the wallpaper. The hall bathroom is full of bath toys, and there’s a strange, donut-shaped contraption on the toilet seat, ostensibly to keep the boys from falling in when they’re crapping, and it doesn’t look terribly sanitary so I decide to use Suzanne’s bathroom. This means I’ll have to go through her bedroom, which could be construed as an invasion of her privacy, but I’ve mopped the puke off her floors and I’m babysitting her son, so we’ve got to be past all of that, right? Besides, she specifically told me to make myself at home, and at home I don’t crap on a plastic piss-stained hemorrhoid donut with Cookie Monster smiling creepily up at me like a puppet with a bathroom fetish.

  Suzanne’s bedroom is done in a dark gray, and her king-sized bed has a quilted leather headboard and is covered in a wine-colored satin duvet with matching throw pillows and sheets. It’s a sexy bed that causes me to slightly revise my impression of her, as does the presence of not one but two identical vibrators in the drawer of her night table that I accidentally open, indicating that she is a woman who takes her orgasms seriously enough to have a backup plan for her backup plan. “Suzanne!” I say out loud, impressed. Still taking generous sips from the Johnnie Walker bottle, I head into the bathroom, which is a cluttered mess from her pre-date preparations: blow dryer, clips, brushes, eyeliners, lipsticks, and other implements of beauty strewn across every available surface. In my somewhat inebriated state, I’m disproportionately touched by all the trouble she went to just to have dinner with me.

  When I come out of the bathroom, I lie down on the bed for a minute, sinking into the pillow mattress, enjoying the sensation of the cool satin against my bare legs. There’s a framed picture on the night table, Suzanne and a girlfriend in their bikinis, holding up colorful umbrella drinks by the pool at some tropical resort. I prop the picture up on my chest and look at her for a little bit. I can’t help but wonder, had our date gone on as planned, if we’d have ended up back here, in this soft, sexy bed. It hadn’t really seemed like an option over dinner, but now that I’m here, I feel like we might have. I close my eyes and try to recall her face over dinner, looking for clues, trying to discern a hidden sensuality, imagining a credible sequence of events that would have led us from stilted dinner conversation to undressing each other and lying down on this crimson softness. Suzanne. There’s an old Journey song by that name, I think. I hum a few bars, but can’t quite remember the lyrics. Journey was such a long, long time ago.

  “Oh my God!” Her voice yanks me out of sleep like a fishhook in the eye, and squinting through the blinding light, I can make out Suzanne standing in the doorway, turning Sam’s face into her thighs, her eyes bulging in shock, mouth wide open, jaw trembling.

  “Suzanne,” I say, sitting up groggily, and in doing so I knock over the picture on my chest and spill the Johnnie Walker, wedged upright between my thighs in what I will later understand to be a somewhat phallic manner, onto the duvet.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she shouts.

  “Listen,” I say, rubbing my eyes while the room spins around me like a carousel. “It’s okay.”

  “You scumbag! Put on your goddamn pants right now and get the hell out of my house!”

  Her face is twisted with rage and disgust, and as I roll off the bed and lurch toward her, she throws her hand up defensively, recoiling in revulsion against the wall. “Stay away from me!” Down the hall, Mason starts to cry. “Oh my God, Mason!” She darts out of the room dragging Sam behind her.

  It feels like slow motion as I run downstairs in a dizzy haze, head pounding, thighs quaking, and yank open the dryer door. My pants come out heavy and soaked, and I realize that I never pushed the start button. I pull them on anyway, wet and frigid against my skin, and then run back upstairs. Through Mason’s bedroom doorway, I can see Suzanne sitting on his bed, holding both crying children on her lap. “Suzanne,” I say.

  The withering look she shoots me carries a nuclear payload that makes every organ in my body contract like a sponge. “Just leave,” she says, and I realize that there will be no fixing this, that there is no explanation she’ll be willing to accept. I am now, and forever will be, the guy she found drunk and pantless in her bed. The next time she tells her bad date stories to another man, I will top the list, and as he shakes his head sympathetically, she’ll shrug and make a self-deprecating comment about all the scumbags and perverts she seems to attract, and it doesn’t seem fair that I should be included in that company, but it’s not like I can file an appeal. And so, damage done, there’s nothing left but to nod sadly, pull up the sagging waist of my cold, soaked pants, and beat the latest in my fast-growing collection of ignoble retreats.

  Driving home, I’m laughing hysterically, or else I’m crying, I’m not exactly sure how to categorize the high, glottal barks erupting like gunfire from my throat, but either way, I can feel sharp, hot pricks on the inside of my chest, the floating jagged edges of all the things in me that are still broken.

  In the weeks that follow, I have enough lousy first dates to merit a musical montage. Cue the pop song and watch Doug try on different outfits and pose in front of the full-length mirror as Claire directs him, laughing from the bed. Watch Doug escorting various attractive and semi-attractive women from central casting in and out of different restaurants and coffee shops. Fast cuts of different wom
en seated across the table: speaking or not speaking, painstakingly scraping the dressing off a piece of Bibb lettuce, angrily underscoring some clearly salient talking point with a violent jab of her finger, weeping uncontrollably, and sucking up a seemingly endless piece of spaghetti. And then more fast cuts of Doug dropping each of these women off at their homes or apartments, shaking hands, or awkwardly jockeying back and forth between handshakes and chaste goodnight pecks, the camera lingering on them in the background to show on their faces the sad certainty of another man who won’t be calling again, and then Doug coming into focus in the foreground as he heads back to his car, his expression bathed in the abject worthlessness of it all. The song choice is key here, something slow, but with a beat, a gruff smoker’s voice singing romantic lyrics laced with irony to convey the utter futility of it all; the boredom, the wasted time, the awkward beginnings and endings, the instantly forgettable, canned-date conversation, the sad, damaged lives to which he is now unwittingly privy, a song that ends in fading minor piano chords as Doug drives home with the windows open, his face sadly vacant as he stares blankly at the empty road ahead.

  Then one sleepless night, I dig out Brooke Hayes’s business card from my wallet and dial her cell phone. She picks up on the fifth ring.

  “It’s Doug,” I say. “Parker.”

  “Hi, Doug Parker,” she says drowsily.